SOA needs a solid foundation that is based on standards and includes policies, contracts, and service level agreements.
To do so, services should be produced with several design qualities, such as composability, loose-coupling, autonomy, data representation standardization.
The definitions of SOA governance agree in its purpose of exercising control, but differ in the responsibilities it should have.
Anne Thomas Manes defines governance as: “The processes that an enterprise puts in place to ensure that things are done [...] in accordance with best practices, architectural principles, government regulations, laws, and other determining factors.
You have to change behavior to make it effective.” [4] Gartner defines SOA Governance as “Ensuring and validating that assets and artifacts within the architecture are acting as expected and maintaining a certain level of quality.” [5] ISO 38500 describes a framework with six guiding principles for corporate governance of information technology and a model for directors to govern IT with three main tasks: evaluate, direct and control.